Bill Cammack

If you go out with the same chick for more than one week, the odds begin to increase exponentially that she’ll want to have a kid with you.

Biologically, that’s how women are built. If you consistently hang around them, they start to see you as a viable protector/provider for your pending family.

Meanwhile, the guy’s just happy to have a cute chick to look at and to ‘get on’ whenever he feels like it.

Sooner or later, she’s going to start testing you with questions about the future. SOONER is the time to act, rather than later, once you realize what’s going on. If that whole “family thing” wasn’t in your playbook, and you don’t want to break up with her ASAP and start over with a different chick that doesn’t like you as much (meaning you have more time until “the kid thing” rolls around again), there’s only ONE thing to do…..

…

Buy her a dog. :D

That’s right friends, BUY HER A DOG!!! :D Works every time.

Besides shoes, there are a few things that women *LOVE*. You’ve probably noticed this already in your own relationship. Women love:
A) Attention
B) Feeling like someone needs them
C) Telling people what to do

Once she gets used to fulfilling these three things through YOU, she starts thinking about the next level. Actually… This is why she wants to have a kid with you in the first place… You paid her too much attention, you let her feel like you needed her, and you acted like you were listening when she told you what to do.

So now, she’s asking these LTR / family-oriented questions and you’re like “How the hell did she come up with all this ‘relationship’ stuff? :/” … That’s right… She made it up on her own, with zero prompting or indication from you that you were doing anything but enjoying your time with her.

Lots of guys’ reaction to this is to start acting strange, have WAAAAAAY less sex with this girl in case of an unfortunate mishap, and break up with her as soon as possible for *ANY* reason they can figure out other than “um… I’m not trying to have a kid with you… PEACE! :D”. If you don’t want to go that route, yet have ZERO intentions of having a kid with her… Buy. Her. A. Dog!

You will notice how in society today, women treat dogs like babies.
They carry them around in bags… Yes, women carry babies in bags. You’ve seen those reversed-backpack things they walk around with the kid in.
They keep them on leashes… Yes, women have kids on leashes… go to the mall and check. Extendable too, just like regular dog leashes, except it doesn’t go around the kid’s neck.
They feed them.
They get attention from them.
They tell them what to do.
They feel like the dog needs them. [Interestingly enough, this is a function of the fact that they FEED the dog. The dog needs FOOD, not HER. However, it still fulfills the necessary emotional requirements to deflect her from stopping taking the pill or poking holes in your condom collection that you left in her crib.]
They take the dogs into stores to shop.
They take dogs with them to outdoor cafes and eat lunch together.
They kiss their dogs.
They sleep with their dogs.
Etc, Etc, Etc……

Besides the myriad identical substitution features, she gets to feel like you and she “have something together”. This has the same relationship-maintaining qualities as buying her an engagement ring to deflect her from asking you about getting married, but that’s a different topic. :D She thinks that “buying a dog together” is an indication of commitment / relationship, so roll with it. Meanwhile, as far as I know, dog food costs less than diapers, and if the two of you end up breaking up, you don’t have to pay child support or pay for the dog to go to college.

The other obvious benefit to buying your girlfriend a dog is you don’t have to spin the wheel of fortune wondering what her body’s going to look like after 9 months of stretching and more eating than she *normally* does. Speaking of which… Did you notice how maternity-wear came into style RIGHT AFTER media attention came to how girls were walking around in the streets with “Muffin-Tops”? That would be the amount of flab that hangs out over their belts when they wear jeans that are too small for them and shirts that aren’t long enough to cover that up. Somebody was really smart to start selling pregnancy clothing to girls that aren’t even pregnant. :D

So, yes. Buy her a dog. You get all the same features as a kid (well, minus eventual language ability) with less current expense and ZERO exit expenses like child support or alimony. You maintain your relationship and don’t have to dump an otherwise perfectly good chick. You maintain her figure and therefore your impetus to get physical with her… which was the whole point of having her around in the first place! :D

DatingGenius

Kristen “Kroosh” Crusius wrote a post the other day about what’s going on in her “Friendiverse”… her universe of friends. Her post reminded me that I had intended to comment about Robert Scoble’s videos about how social networks’ “friends lists” really work.

Part I of Social Graph Based Search. 14:41 minutes.

Part II of Social Graph Based Search. 15 minutes.

And a bonus round III. 6 minutes.

I didn’t get around to writing that post because I’ve been incredibly busy for the last two months.

I think the term “Friends”, as automatically used by several social sites is an unfortunate and misleading label. This is especially true when there are no other choices. You’re forced into a binary system…. Accept or Decline… Yes or No… 1 or 0… My-Friend or Not-My-Friend. Unfortunately, as Scoble pointed out in his videos, reality doesn’t work like that. There are different levels and flavors of relationships between people. Business relationships, Family relationships, Intimate relationships, Adversarial relationships… I think linkedin has it right with the generic term “contact”. How many ‘contacts’ do you have? They’re not (your friends) by default, nor are they (not your friends) by default. Still, in linkedin, there are several types of business relationships, including people that you have worked with personally… people you have not worked with personally, but you trust whomever recommended them to you… people you have not worked with and you have no professional recommendations for, but you vouch for them as a person, so you are happy to recommend them to someone who’s looking to fill a position…. people you have no intention of recommending to anyone, but you will still accept them as a contact… people that you are in contact with specifically so you can set them up with other people….. ALL of these are thrown in together under the title ‘contact’.

Because of the misnomer “friends”, some people have selected this to mean their ACTUAL friends and will only add people that they actually know. Here, I agree with Scoble’s assertion that this is an incorrect usage of social networks. How are you supposed to expand your circle of CONTACTS or “sphere of influence” if you limit yourself on the internet to only the people you know IRL? How are you supposed to learn about new people that might have similar interests or ideals if you deny them connection to you? What’s the point of being on a social site if you’re only going to get in touch with the same people you’re already in contact with? I think that if they had levels of acquaintance on these sites, a lot more people would be connected to each other, because the categories would make sense to them. You would be able to see at-a-glance what level each person had placed their contacts on, and make a better assessment of their actual interaction with each other.

Looking at it from the other direction… It’s not fair that someone that sends you a friends request out of the blue has the exact same status as someone you collaborate with or work with or highly respect or go out for drinks with or climb mountains and eat pancakes with. Both the random person and the IRL friend are marked down as “Friend”. There’s no meritocracy. Even with facebook’s relationship qualifiers, that’s a SECONDARY trait. It’s like having everyone in your military with the rank of ‘Private’, and you have to go to each Private and ask them what their actual importance is in order to determine who out-ranks whom. No. It doesn’t work like that. You can tell from the bars or whatever emblem on their shoulders who’s running the show and who’s going to be digging the trenches.

In the absence of actual distinctions, I think the best approach to accepting/rejecting social site “friends” is innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around. It’s always a good thing when you can see the applicant’s friends list in order to tell who might know them that YOU know and whose judgement you trust. When I know certain people don’t like jerks, and those people are “friends” with someone, I’m more likely to take my ACTUAL friend’s word that this other person is cool. That would seem to go against what I was saying earlier, because what if my friend is using the same “innocent until proven guilty” style that I am? :) I would be accepting an untested “friend”. However, checks & balances will come into play. If the untested person actually interacts with the community, they’ll start getting “reviews” which will help you decide whether you want to keep them as a friend or not. Ultimately, the circle polices itself.

I was thinking about Kroosh’s “Friendiverse” yesterday, while I was watching Drew’s live stream from PodCamp Philly. It’s a much more intimate format… giving personal, “hand-written” recommendations of places to go, people to see and things to do. I saw many people from MY Friendiverse on Drew’s stream yesterday… Kathryn, Eric, Jackson, Jonny, Steve, Grace, Charles… and ran into others in the text chat who were also watching the stream.

Ultimately, I’ve been inspired to focus more time & energy on the upper echelon of my own personal Friendiverse. In the game called “keeping up with the net”, it’s very easy to miss out on telling the people that matter to you how cool you think they are. :)

Bill Cammack • New York City • Freelance Video Editor • alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack